Call and Response Quotes

Jazz is rhythm and meaning.

Blues is a very physical music.

I mean, in the course of an evening, people will take a solo here and there, but generally it's all about the rhythm of that music. Dealing with the rhythm with everything. That's essentially at least my concept of what that group is.

I'm interested in Qawwali and the blues.

Jazz is smooth and cool. Jazz is rage. Jazz flows like water. Jazz never seems to begin or end. Jazz isn't methodical, but jazz isn't messy either. Jazz is a conversation, a give and take. Jazz is the connection and communication between musicians. Jazz is abandon.

My definition of Blues is that it's a musical form which is very disciplined and structured coupled with a state of mind, and you can have either of those things but it's the two together that make it what it is. And you need to be a student for one, and a human being for the other, but those things alone don't do it.

A lot of people wonder, what is the blues? Well, I'm gonna tell you what the blues is.

These three elements are called Qawwali, and they've got to be there.

I love the sound of voices singing together, congregational singing, anything like gospel, or folk, or sea shanties.

Everybody knows that at a Freedia show, you're definitely going to have some crowd participation, and they're anticipating and waiting for that moment.

I love a band that has a banjo, that does group harmonies and yells out the word 'Hey' or 'Woo.' I live for it.

Jazz of the sort we play is a happy, extroverted music. You don't have to think about it too much.

Jazz is people's music, a collectivity.

This music that was supposed to only come from tapes like in any restaurant. Something would happened. One bird will start to do a little jazz thing, and another bird will start to answer.

The blues. It runs through all American music. Somebody bending the note. The other is the two-beat groove. It's in New Orleans music, it's in jazz, it's in country music, it's in gospel.

We played, jazz, blues, dixie, and it all came from the church. When I went to church, I would see the sisters and brothers doing the same beat.

Well, I tell you... the first chorus, I plays the melody. The second chorus, I plays the melody round the melody, and the third chorus, I routines.

One of the things I really like about West African guitar playing is the way it makes harmony linear. They're really spelling things out and turning chords into melodies instead of just letting them be these hanging blocks of color.

I hope it might help players have confidence in our own ways, and not to be afraid of them, as Bernstein showed - things like hoe-downs, fiddle songs, and the art of improvisation, and the New Orleans funeral tradition, and call-and-response church singing, and the fact that the blues run through everything. And in our relationship to European music, in that we don't have to imitate it, it's a part of us, inseparable.

I've performed in Japan before, as well as many other non-English speaking countries. I find you really just have to be a bit more animated than usual. Call-and-response routines work well, if they are simple. Otherwise, I just dance around like a circus monkey and hope the crowd feels it.

Black musicians were imitating speech cadences, and Kerouac was imitating the black musicians' breath cadences on their horns and brought it back to speech. It always was speech rhythms or cadences as far as the ear that Kerouac was developing. All passed through black music.

Denied dancing and musical instruments, slaves expressed a hidden tradition of musicality and poetics by tongue and signal.

The Blues? It's the mother of American music. That's what is is - the source.

Blues is such a dynamic and ever-changing system of music.

All jazz comes from blues. Blues first.